GM’s Bob Boniface retires: “Be authentic, vulnerable and a good listener”

After just over 22 years at General Motors, Bob Boniface has retired. 

Boniface started at GM as director of the advanced design studio in 2004 before moving to direct the design for the Chevrolet Volt and the Opel Ampera production cars. He then moved to director of General Motors crossover vehicles, working on projects such as the 2013 GMC Acadia and the 2013 Chevrolet Traverse. Afterwards, Boniface spent just under six years as director for Cadillac exterior design. Then he took on the role of director of global Buick design before returning to Cadillac as exterior design director. 

Prior to GM, Boniface began his career in a completely different industry – economics. After two years, Boniface went back to university to pursue his dream of car design, gaining a place on CCS’s transportation design course.  He then completed a six-year stint at the Chrysler Corporation and then five years at the Daimler-Chrysler Corporation. 

Boniface joins a plethora of GM design legends who have recently retired – including Sharon Gauci, Michael Simcoe and Andrew Smith.  

CDN caught up with Boniface to hear the pearls of wisdom he has gathered over his car design career. Aspiring designers might want to keep a notebook handy… 

Car Design News: Let’s start at the beginning. CCS is such a prominent design university today, but what was it like to study there in the late 1980’s/early 90’s? 

Bob Boniface: It was really different and much more hands-on, especially having been through a traditional university experience at Vanderbilt. When you go to university to study traditional subjects, it can be theoretical, but when you go to an art school, it becomes: ‘make these 10 renderings by Tuesday, and we're going to tear them apart’. It's more learning a craft, at least at the beginning when you're learning how to draw, how to render and how to design. Later you start to understand the practical applications of what you've learned, and that's where it becomes more like a traditional university.  

The first year at any art school is a filtering mechanism – not everyone makes it into the programme. You have to work really hard and have a certain amount of ability. For instance, when I started at CCS, there were 75 people in my class that were trying to get into the transportation program, and they accepted 15, and we graduated 11. So, it was a ‘cull the herd’, as they say. 

The best designers coming out of school now are excellent artists…2D skills are still the foundation that every designer should have and that just makes you better when you use the AI tools or the virtual surfacing tools. You have to start with the fundamentals, and the fundamentals will never change as far as I'm concerned

CDN: Is design a natural ability or can it be taught? 

BB: It’s a combination of passion and an innate ability that makes you special. There's a noticeable difference between product designers and transportation designers. There's a lot of overlap, don't get me wrong, but there's something about the love of automobiles, the love of shape and surfacing and proportion and applying that to a product, which a car is, with the right balance. Some people don't ever get to that level. They become a little bit too left-brained and overanalyse what they’re doing.  

Whereas when you're sketching a car, it has to really just come out of you. Then you apply the left brain and start to analyse, how am I going to build this? How am I going to package people in the car? Where do you put the powertrain? So, you have to start with this emotional connection to what you drew and then turn your brain over to the other side and make it real. And not everyone can make that transition. It’s a unique craft. 

CDN: For these freshly graduated students, who are perhaps building their portfolios and applying for jobs now, what would your advice be? 

BB: AI tools have gotten so good, but a lot of designers in schools these days rely solely on the tool rather than the emotion. The use of Vizcom gets a little stale because they're letting AI fill in the blanks, so to speak. My piece of advice would be pencil and paper. Of course, you have to use the virtual tools and the AI tools at some point, but don't start with that. 

There’s no substitute for the act of your brain telling your hand what to do. It's almost like reading. When you read, you educate yourself, or if you're studying for exam, you read, you take notes. When you take notes, it imprints it into your brain. You have to go through that emotional connection from your head to your hand. The best designers coming out of school now are excellent artists. They know how to draw a car – in fact, they know how to draw everything. 2D skills are still the foundation that every designer should have. And that just makes you better when you use the AI tools or the virtual surfacing tools. You have to start with the fundamentals, and the fundamentals will never change as far as I'm concerned. 

When we're hiring someone, we really want to know how they think, how they problem solve and how they evaluate a design. We're not hiring them because they showed us a nice image, so they should be cautious on how much they rely on AI-generated portfolios. 

CDN: I’m sure with the rise of AI and new OEMs, the car industry has changed so much since you started. Where has it evolved, and where has it remained constant? 

BB: The industry has changed in a lot of ways, but the work we do is still solving the same problems. How do you create something that’s beautiful that people will engage with, but that also meets set criteria? 

In the 1990s when I started, it was fuel economy and performance. And now it's EV range, autonomy, pedestrian impact and increasing regulations on crash performance. So the cars look different, but you still have to design your way around a piece of criteria. If a designer has that flexibility of thought, they'll figure out a way – and designers always feel like there's a better way. They're presented with a set of issues, and a good designer doesn't take it at face value. They'll challenge everything to find a better way to work within the constraints that are imposed upon them. That's what designers do. That’s what I loved about the business, the problem solving. 

CDN: You’ve moved between quite a few senior roles at GM. What makes a good design leader? 

BB: Authenticity is key. With my design teams, I’ve never tried to have them think of me as their boss – I just have a different job. When reviewing a sketch, it’s important to start with the good news, and then offer what we can do to change it.  

Never try to be an authoritarian, always come from a place of vulnerability and authenticity. When we’re dealing with engineers, some designers will draw their line in the sand and will not budge. You have to find that common ground with a chief engineer, so they understand the ‘why’ and you as a designer then also understand their ‘why’. Once you build that connection, that interaction will become more productive. 

To maintain a good team environment, you need to be one of them and work with them to come up with something better. I don’t want designers to come up with something that I can think of. A design leader has to be open-minded enough to say ‘wow, I never would have thought of that’ and then follow that idea, so you have to be flexible. I’ve grown so much as a designer by watching the work that my team has done – you’ll get stagnant if you don’t see new ideas. 

My father always told me to be a good listener, be measured in your feedback and also be measured in your presentations to people who outrank you, because you need them to trust you. It’s a bit of a dark art really [laughs] and there’s no handbook for it. Sometimes it’s luck and sometimes it’s a leader who supports you to get you to that next level. 

Any good designer can be creative in isolation but merging that creativity into corporate mandates is the most challenging part

CDN: You’ve worked on so many amazing projects throughout your career, which ones stand out to you? 

BB: There’s so many. For any designer, the first car they got on the road will always be special. For me, it was the Dodge Intrepid in 1998, the first car I had ever worked on – but there were a lot of things I didn’t like about it. The next one was the Jeep Liberty (Jeep Cherokee in Europe), which I led the design from sketch to release. I really enjoyed working on that one, it validated the abilities I had and the trust the leadership had in me as a young designer. When I moved, the Chrysler 300 was special, but when I came to GM it’s got to be the fifth generation Chevrolet Camaro. 

The Camaro had been killed, and the very first thing I did when I got to GM was talk to Ed Welburn (VP of the advanced design studio at the time) and say that I want to do a Camaro. He told me that we killed that car and that coupes don’t sell. Then he looked at me and said something I’ll never forgot – ‘I’m not telling you not to work on it. All I’m saying is don’t let anyone know. You’ve got to do it in secret.’ So, I worked for 18 months on that car, we got an audience with Bob Lutz (vice chairman of GM) who then approved the programme.  

The Buick Wildcat concept was also done in secret. The Buick studio was trying to balance German Teutonic language with Buick’s sculptural beauty and we were always stuck somewhere in the middle. In one of our weekly sketch reviews, I said let’s do a quick sketch study on what kind of face you would put on a Buick if you didn’t have to share it with anyone. One guy presented this sketch that looks like a face that could be adapted to a variety of different vehicles – so we did a scale model and didn’t even show Michael Simcoe until it was done.  

We then had Simcoe come into a design review for a different product, but put the Wildcat scale model by the door, so he would walk past it. He started walking past the concept and he stopped, looked at me and said, ‘what’s this?’, so I explained it to him, and he stayed for over an hour looking at this model. Right before we closed for summer, he told me that when we returned, we need to make this car full size. We ended up putting that face and surface language on all our production cars and it reinvigorated the whole brand. 

CDN: On the flip side, what were some of the biggest challenges faced as a designer? 

BB: The biggest challenges are interpersonal ones. Trying to stay afloat, don’t make enemies, keeping leadership happy. It’s tough because the studio environment is a creative incubator, but you’re part of a larger corporation and therefore trying to balance the creative work with the corporate side. Programmes have deadlines, budgets and criteria and these are non-negotiables. So, you are trying to do something special but also mesh with these non-negotiations, that’s the hardest part. Any good designer can be creative in isolation but merging that creativity into corporate mandates is the most challenging part. 

CDN: They say a car designer never truly retires, what are you plans now? 

BB: Everyone says when you retire, don’t make any decisions for six months, so that’s my plan.